I'm getting married (thanks, but let's skip the congratulations) and from the get-go I've been thinking about the food I'm going to have on the big day. This is mostly because I'm a bit of a porker, but also because, thinking back over weddings I've been to, the food is almost invariably a bit dull. Or overcooked. Or raw.

Wanting to avoid this, it's taken a while (and a few tastings), for me to decide on a chef and a menu. Now, however, I think I've finally got this wedding breakfast thing licked. Not literally, you understand, although along the way I've been learning about what happens when wedding food goes wrong. Needless to say, it's not pretty ...

The earliest my (somewhat dubious) research has taken me back is to ye olden time of 23 May 1891, when a British Medical Journal article tells of "Wholesale poisoning at a wedding feast". 60 guests sat down to enjoy a banquet of gluttonous delights. Only 20 of them got up again. The rest were rolling around on the floor, clutching their bellies and having seizures. Sadly, as the report reveals, it was nothing to do with a hilarious best man's speech: "five of the persons so attacked had died up to the date when the facts were placed on record."

More recently, the South Wales Echo tells the less deadly but more disgusting story of a 'dream' wedding in the Turkish sun. On the big day the happy couple looked around to find some guests trying to stop themselves being sick while others bolted to the toilet after eating the food. Not only was the wedding ceremony, reception and first night as a married couple ruined, but the honeymoon they spent at the resort "was equally disastrous as people were defecating in the pool because of illness and so swimming was banned."

Of course, your average wedding breakfast won't be the food equivalent of the apocalypse, but when you're a bride, it's the small things that matter. Take this cake for instance. It's one of a whole crowd on the Cakewrecks blog, and was designed for a beach wedding in the Philippines. You'll see it comes decorated with a 'tropical theme' if tropical means roughly chopped apple quarters and browning bananas still in their skins. The picture caption sums it up: "how hard is it, when you're on a freaking tropical island, to find fruit that isn't so close to being rotten that it makes your kids tipsy?" Cakewrecks runs through a whole gamut of gateaux that didn't quite live up to brides' expectations including one that leans at an angle to rival the Tower of Pisa.

More mundane horror stories from wedding guests include the vegetarian friend who had to refuse a meat option three times and was eventually served - "a plate of stodgy, lukewarm gnocchi that tasted like re-hydrated cardboard", and the "insult on a plate" another friend got: tepid Birds Eye vegetable medley, the small cubes of carrot piled artfully in the centre of her plate.

For a soon-to-be-married couple, sourcing decent grub is especially difficult when your dream wedding venue comes with a caterer included. More so when that caterer doesn't share your foodie dreams. When I was searching for suppliers, one chef proudly produced an impressively long list of salads, one of which was a bogey-coloured mix of melon, avocado and prawns (of the squishy defrosted variety). I imagined it, sitting there on a plate on my wedding day, looking at me with reproachful eyes like Slimer, the friendly blob of ectoplasm from Ghostbusters.

Why then, after all the care and planning, is wedding food so often so awful? Sam Goodbourn, a caterer who's been in the trade for years, says that the most common mistake people make is not having enough hands to get all the food out quickly so it stays warm and fresh. Sam also urges couples to have a realistic idea of what can be done according to the venue: "if your reception is in the middle of a field in a marquee, you can't ask for Heston Blumenthal-style cooking."

Personally, for my wedding reception in May, the only hot thing on the menu is a pig on a spit: hard, you would think, to get wrong. But does anyone have any advice for would-be foodie brides and grooms out there? What would be your ideal wedding menu? Or just feel free to recount your horrific tales of bad wedding food.